Employing speech recognition features in interactive education computer games and other software tends to enhance user interactivity and the overall user experience. However, current methods for performing speech recognition attempt to recognize each word of an entire sentence. This is computationally expensive and difficult to implement, especially on handheld mobile devices, which in general have central processing units (CPU) of limited capabilities. In addition, current speech recognition methods are computationally cost prohibitive to combine with already computationally expensive computer games. Furthermore, since each word must be recognized before a sentence is recognized, current methods are not suited for performing speech recognition with small children, who tend to be noisy or play in noisy areas, which can interfere with recognition of one or more words of a sentence. Lastly, current methods tend to err by producing false negatives; that is, the current methods are more likely not to recognize correctly spoken speech than to recognize incorrectly spoken speech by a user, which tends to discourage the user, making the user experience unpleasant and thwarting acquisition of reading skills.